OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Tracking Based Semi-Automatic Annotation for Scene Text Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Recently, video scene text detection has received increasing attention due to its comprehensive applications. However, the lack of annotated scene text video datasets has become one of the most important problems, which hinders the development of video scene text detection. The existing scene text video datasets are not large-scale due to the expensive cost caused by manual labeling. In addition, the text instances in these datasets are too clear to be a challenge. To address the above issues, we propose a tracking based semi-automatic labeling strategy for scene text videos in this paper. We get semi-automatic scene text annotation by labeling manually for the first frame and tracking automatically for the subsequent frames, which avoid the huge cost of manual labeling. Moreover, a paired low-quality scene text video dataset named Text-RBL is proposed, consisting of raw videos, blurry videos, and low-resolution videos, labeled by the proposed convenient semi-automatic labeling strategy. Through an averaging operation and bicubic down-sampling operation over the raw videos, we can efficiently obtain blurry videos and low-resolution videos paired with raw videos separately. To verify the effectiveness of Text-RBL, we propose a baseline model combined with the text detector and tracker for video scene text detection. Moreover, a failure detection scheme is designed to alleviate the baseline model drift issue caused by complex scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Text-RBL with paired low-quality videos labeled by the semi-automatic method can significantly improve the performance of the text detector in low-quality scenes.
Automatic Clustering in Hyrise
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2021
Year: 2021

Physical data layout is an important performance factor for modern databases. Clustering, i.e., storing similar values in proximity, can lead to performance gains in several ways. We present an automated model to determine beneficial clustering columns and a clustering algorithm for the column-oriented, memory-resident database Hyrise. To automatically select clustering columns, the model analyzes the database's workload and provides estimates by how much certain clustering columns would impact the workload's latency. We evaluate the precision of the model's estimates, as well as the overall quality of its clustering suggestions. To apply a determined clustering configuration, we developed an online clustering algorithm. The clustering algorithm supports an arbitrary number of clustering dimensions. We show that the algorithm is robust against concurrently running data modifying queries. We obtain a 5% latency reduction for the TPC-H benchmark when clustering the lineitem table and a 4% latency reduction for the TPC-DS benchmark when clustering the store_sales table.
An Adversarial Human Pose Estimation Network Injected with Graph Structure
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Because of the invisible human keypoints in images caused by illumination, occlusion and overlap, it is likely to produce unreasonable human pose prediction for most of the current human pose estimation methods. In this paper, we design a novel generative adversarial network (GAN) to improve the localization accuracy of visible joints when some joints are invisible. The network consists of two simple but efficient modules, Cascade Feature Network (CFN) and Graph Structure Network (GSN). First, the CFN utilizes the prediction maps from the previous stages to guide the prediction maps in the next stage to produce accurate human pose. Second, the GSN is designed to contribute to the localization of invisible joints by passing message among different joints. According to GAN, if the prediction pose produced by the generator G cannot be distinguished by the discriminator D, the generator network G has successfully obtained the underlying dependence of human joints. We conduct experiments on three widely used human pose estimation benchmark datasets, LSP, MPII and COCO, whose results show the effectiveness of our proposed framework.
SCNN: Swarm Characteristic Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2021
Year: 2021

Deep learning is a powerful approach with good performance on many different tasks. However, these models often require massive computational resources. It is a worrying trend that we increasingly need models that work well on more complex problems. In this paper, we propose and verify the effectiveness and efficiency of SCNN, an innovative neural network inspired by the swarm concept. In addition to introducing the relevant theories, our detailed experiments suggest that fewer parameters may perform better than models with more parameters. Besides, our experiments show that SCNN needs less data than traditional models. That could be an essential hint for problems where there is not much data.
Risk Bounds for Learning via Hilbert Coresets
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We develop a formalism for constructing stochastic upper bounds on the expected full sample risk for supervised classification tasks via the Hilbert coresets approach within a transductive framework. We explicitly compute tight and meaningful bounds for complex datasets and complex hypothesis classes such as state-of-the-art deep neural network architectures. The bounds we develop exhibit nice properties: i) the bounds are non-uniform in the hypothesis space, ii) in many practical examples, the bounds become effectively deterministic by appropriate choice of prior and training data-dependent posterior distributions on the hypothesis space, and iii) the bounds become significantly better with increase in the size of the training set. We also lay out some ideas to explore for future research.
Hidden-nodes in coexisting LAA & Wi-Fi: a measurement study of real deployments
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

LTE-Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) networks are beginning to be deployed widely in major metropolitan areas in the US in the unlicensed 5 GHz bands, which have existing dense deployments of Wi-Fi. This provides a real-world opportunity to study the problems due to hidden-node scenarios between LAA and Wi-Fi. The hidden node problem has been well studied in the context of overlapping Wi-Fi APs. However, when Wi-Fi coexists with LAA, the hidden node problem is exacerbated since LAA cannot use the well-known Request-to-Send (RTS)/Clear to-Send (CTS) mechanism to resolve contentions, resulting in throughput degradation for Wi-Fi. In this paper, we describe detailed measurements and conclusions from experiments on the campus of the University of Chicago which presents a perfect hidden node scenario where Wi-Fi access points (APs) controlled by us and an LAA base-station (BS) deployed by AT&T are hidden from each other, but the clients are not. We performed careful experiments in three different regions of the coexistence area: (i) clients midway between LAA & Wi-Fi; (ii) clients close to the Wi-Fi AP; and (iii) clients close to the LAA BS. Our results show that in a situation where LAA uses an aggregate of three unlicensed channels (60 MHz bandwidth) which overlap with an 80 MHz Wi-Fi transmission, the Wi-Fi throughput at client devices suffers considerably. Overall, Wi-Fi performance is impacted by the hidden node problem more severely than LAA. In the best outdoor conditions, the throughput of LAA and Wi-Fi is reduced by 35% and 97% respectively when coexisting with each other as compared when the other system is not present. Furthermore, we conclude that when both LAA and Wi-Fi use multiple 20 MHz channels and there are multiple Wi-Fi APs coexisting with LAA on the same set of channels, the choice of Wi-Fi primary channels can have a significant impact on LAA throughput.
Current Trends and Applications of Dempster-Shafer Theory (Review)
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

The article provides a review of the publications on the current trends and developments in Dempster-Shafer theory and its different applications in science, engineering, and technologies. The review took account of the following provisions with a focus on some specific aspects of the theory. Firstly, the article considers the research directions whose results are known not only in scientific and academic community but understood by a wide circle of potential designers and developers of advanced engineering solutions and technologies. Secondly, the article shows the theory applications in some important areas of human activity such as manufacturing systems, diagnostics of technological processes, materials and products, building and construction, product quality control, economic and social systems. The particular attention is paid to the current state of research in the domains under consideration and, thus, the papers published, as a rule, in recent years and presenting the achievements of modern research on Dempster-Shafer theory and its application are selected and analyzed.
Hybrid Evolutionary Optimization Approach for Oilfield Well Control Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2021
Year: 2021

Oilfield production optimization is challenging due to subsurface model complexity and associated non-linearity, large number of control parameters, large number of production scenarios, and subsurface uncertainties. Optimization involves time-consuming reservoir simulation studies to compare different production scenarios and settings. This paper presents efficacy of two hybrid evolutionary optimization approaches for well control optimization of a waterflooding operation, and demonstrates their application using Olympus benchmark. A simpler, weighted sum of cumulative fluid (WCF) is used as objective function first, which is then replaced by net present value (NPV) of discounted cash-flow for comparison. Two popular evolutionary optimization algorithms, genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO), are first used in standalone mode to solve well control optimization problem. Next, both GA and PSO methods are used with another popular optimization algorithm, covariance matrix adaptation-evolution strategy (CMA-ES), in hybrid mode. Hybrid optimization run is made by transferring the resulting population from one algorithm to the next as its starting population for further improvement. Approximately four thousand simulation runs are needed for standalone GA and PSO methods to converge, while six thousand runs are needed in case of two hybrid optimization modes (GA-CMA-ES and PSO-CMA-ES). To reduce turn-around time, commercial cloud computing is used and simulation workload is distributed using parallel programming. GA and PSO algorithms have a good balance between exploratory and exploitative properties, thus are able identify regions of interest. CMA-ES algorithm is able to further refine the solution using its excellent exploitative properties. Thus, GA or PSO with CMA-ES in hybrid mode yields better optimization result as compared to standalone GA or PSO algorithms.
Meeting in the notebook: a notebook-based environment for micro-submissions in data science collaborations
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Developers in data science and other domains frequently use computational notebooks to create exploratory analyses and prototype models. However, they often struggle to incorporate existing software engineering tooling into these notebook-based workflows, leading to fragile development processes. We introduce Assemblé, a new development environment for collaborative data science projects, in which promising code fragments of data science pipelines can be contributed as pull requests to an upstream repository entirely from within JupyterLab, abstracting away low-level version control tool usage. We describe the design and implementation of Assemblé and report on a user study of 23 data scientists.
Classifying the Unstructured IT Service Desk Tickets Using Ensemble of Classifiers
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Manual classification of IT service desk tickets may result in routing of the tickets to the wrong resolution group. Incorrect assignment of IT service desk tickets leads to reassignment of tickets, unnecessary resource utilization and delays the resolution time. Traditional machine learning algorithms can be used to automatically classify the IT service desk tickets. Service desk ticket classifier models can be trained by mining the historical unstructured ticket description and the corresponding label. The model can then be used to classify the new service desk ticket based on the ticket description. The performance of the traditional classifier systems can be further improved by using various ensemble of classification techniques. This paper brings out the three most popular ensemble methods ie, Bagging, Boosting and Voting ensemble for combining the predictions from different models to further improve the accuracy of the ticket classifier system. The performance of the ensemble classifier system is checked against the individual base classifiers using various performance metrics. Ensemble of classifiers performed well in comparison with the corresponding base classifiers. The advantages of building such an automated ticket classifier systems are simplified user interface, faster resolution time, improved productivity, customer satisfaction and growth in business. The real world service desk ticket data from a large enterprise IT infrastructure is used for our research purpose.
Visuality in a Cross-disciplinary Battleground: Analysis of Inscriptions in Digital Humanities Journal Publications
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2021
Year: 2021

Like the old saying, "a graph is worth a thousand words," the non-verbal language, encapsulated in the concept of inscription, is a fundamental rhetorical device in the construction of knowledge represented by research outputs. As many inscriptions are deeply situated in a scientific and data-driven research paradigm, they can be used to understand the relationships between research traditions involved in the field of digital humanities (DH), a highly cross-disciplinary field that is frequently regarded as a battleground between these distinct research traditions, especially the humanities and STEM fields. This paper presents a quantitative, community-focused examination of how inscriptions are used in English-language research articles in DH journals. We randomly selected 252 articles published between 2011 and 2020 from a representative DH journal list, and manually coded and classified inscriptions and author domains in these publications. We found that inscriptions have been increasingly used during the past decade and their uses are more intensive in publications led by STEM authors comparing to other domains. This study offers a timely survey of the disciplinary landscape of DH from the perspective of inscriptions and sheds light on how different research approaches collaborated and combated in the field of DH.
TREC 2020 Podcasts Track Overview
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

The Podcast Track is new at the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) in 2020. The podcast track was designed to encourage research into podcasts in the information retrieval and NLP research communities. The track consisted of two shared tasks: segment retrieval and summarization, both based on a dataset of over 100,000 podcast episodes (metadata, audio, and automatic transcripts) which was released concurrently with the track. The track generated considerable interest, attracted hundreds of new registrations to TREC and fifteen teams, mostly disjoint between search and summarization, made final submissions for assessment. Deep learning was the dominant experimental approach for both search experiments and summarization. This paper gives an overview of the tasks and the results of the participants' experiments. The track will return to TREC 2021 with the same two tasks, incorporating slight modifications in response to participant feedback.
Contextual Text Embeddings for Twi
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Transformer-based language models have been changing the modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) landscape for high-resource languages such as English, Chinese, Russian, etc. However, this technology does not yet exist for any Ghanaian language. In this paper, we introduce the first of such models for Twi or Akan, the most widely spoken Ghanaian language. The specific contribution of this research work is the development of several pretrained transformer language models for the Akuapem and Asante dialects of Twi, paving the way for advances in application areas such as Named Entity Recognition (NER), Neural Machine Translation (NMT), Sentiment Analysis (SA) and Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging. Specifically, we introduce four different flavours of ABENA -- A BERT model Now in Akan that is fine-tuned on a set of Akan corpora, and BAKO - BERT with Akan Knowledge only, which is trained from scratch. We open-source the model through the Hugging Face model hub and demonstrate its use via a simple sentiment classification example.
Does it work outside this benchmark? Introducing the Rigid Depth Constructor tool, depth validation dataset construction in rigid scenes for the masses
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We present a protocol to construct your own depth validation dataset for navigation. This protocol, called RDC for Rigid Depth Constructor, aims at being more accessible and cheaper than already existing techniques, requiring only a camera and a Lidar sensor to get started. We also develop a test suite to get insightful information from the evaluated algorithm. Finally, we take the example of UAV videos, on which we test two depth algorithms that were initially tested on KITTI and show that the drone context is dramatically different from in-car videos. This shows that a single context benchmark should not be considered reliable, and when developing a depth estimation algorithm, one should benchmark it on a dataset that best fits one's particular needs, which often means creating a brand new one. Along with this paper we provide the tool with an open source implementation and plan to make it as user-friendly as possible, to make depth dataset creation possible even for small teams. Our key contributions are the following: We propose a complete, open-source and almost fully automatic software application for creating validation datasets with densely annotated depth, adaptable to a wide variety of image, video and range data. It includes selection tools to adapt the dataset to specific validation needs, and conversion tools to other dataset formats. Using this application, we propose two new real datasets, outdoor and indoor, readily usable in UAV navigation context. Finally as examples, we show an evaluation of two depth prediction algorithms, using a collection of comprehensive (e.g. distribution based) metrics.
Tigris: a DSL and Framework for Monitoring Software Systems at Runtime
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

The understanding of the behavioral aspects of a software system is an essential enabler for many software engineering activities, such as adaptation. This involves collecting runtime data from the system so that it is possible to analyze the collected data to guide actions upon the system. Consequently, software monitoring imposes practical challenges because it is often done by intercepting the system execution and recording gathered information. Such monitoring may degrade the performance and disrupt the system execution to unacceptable levels. In this paper, we introduce a two-phase monitoring approach to support the monitoring step in adaptive systems. The first phase collects lightweight coarse-grained information and identifies relevant parts of the software that should be monitored in detail based on a provided domain-specific language. This language is informed by a systematic literature review. The second phase collects relevant and fine-grained information needed for deciding whether and how to adapt the managed system. Our approach is implemented as a framework, called Tigris, that can be seamlessly integrated into existing software systems to support monitoring-based activities. To validate our proposal, we instantiated Tigris to support an application-level caching approach, which adapts caching decisions of a software system at runtime to improve its performance.
Minimum complexity interpolation in random features models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Despite their many appealing properties, kernel methods are heavily affected by the curse of dimensionality. For instance, in the case of inner product kernels in $\mathbb{R}^d$, the Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) norm is often very large for functions that depend strongly on a small subset of directions (ridge functions). Correspondingly, such functions are difficult to learn using kernel methods. This observation has motivated the study of generalizations of kernel methods, whereby the RKHS norm -- which is equivalent to a weighted $\ell_2$ norm -- is replaced by a weighted functional $\ell_p$ norm, which we refer to as $\mathcal{F}_p$ norm. Unfortunately, tractability of these approaches is unclear. The kernel trick is not available and minimizing these norms requires to solve an infinite-dimensional convex problem. We study random features approximations to these norms and show that, for $p>1$, the number of random features required to approximate the original learning problem is upper bounded by a polynomial in the sample size. Hence, learning with $\mathcal{F}_p$ norms is tractable in these cases. We introduce a proof technique based on uniform concentration in the dual, which can be of broader interest in the study of overparametrized models. For $p= 1$, our guarantees for the random features approximation break down. We prove instead that learning with the $\mathcal{F}_1$ norm is $\mathsf{NP}$-hard under a randomized reduction based on the problem of learning halfspaces with noise.
Assessing YOLACT++ for real time and robust instance segmentation of medical instruments in endoscopic procedures
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Image-based tracking of laparoscopic instruments plays a fundamental role in computer and robotic-assisted surgeries by aiding surgeons and increasing patient safety. Computer vision contests, such as the Robust Medical Instrument Segmentation (ROBUST-MIS) Challenge, seek to encourage the development of robust models for such purposes, providing large, diverse, and annotated datasets. To date, most of the existing models for instance segmentation of medical instruments were based on two-stage detectors, which provide robust results but are nowhere near to the real-time (5 frames-per-second (fps)at most). However, in order for the method to be clinically applicable, real-time capability is utmost required along with high accuracy. In this paper, we propose the addition of attention mechanisms to the YOLACT architecture that allows real-time instance segmentation of instrument with improved accuracy on the ROBUST-MIS dataset. Our proposed approach achieves competitive performance compared to the winner ofthe 2019 ROBUST-MIS challenge in terms of robustness scores,obtaining 0.313 MI_DSC and 0.338 MI_NSD, while achieving real-time performance (37 fps)